Voices of Faith: Sharing a recipe for peace

What can we as a community do to promote compassion and leadership? What can we do to counteract the false narratives that seek to divide us?

Children at the Well has a solid answer. Since 2006, this local storytelling program has empowered young people to change the world. Brought together to share stories from their diverse traditions, they find what they have in common. They become champions for world peace, spreading this knowledge as they step into their lives as young adults.

Children at the Well encourages young people to explore the stories of their cultural, religious, and family heritage as well as stories from their own lives. It gives them the opportunities to learn to tell those stories to audiences large and small. And it develops leadership and inter-cultural ambassadorship.

Sometimes the stories face difficult issues head-on. Up until last year Shadeh told traditional tales that profess her strong belief in Islam and others that were funny and lighthearted. But in her final year in Children at the Well Shadeh took a risk and created a story of the recent history of the Nuristan Province in Afghanistan, where her father was born. It was about war, terror and death, but it also told of family ties and friendships. She worked hard to find the right balance of light and shade. For her last performance, dressed in a striking blue traditional outfit, she seemed to have grown in stature with the telling of the story.

Sometimes the powerful effect is less straightforward. A number of years ago, a group of Children at the Well students, staff and parents met with eight women scholars from Jordan who listened somewhat stonily as we explained our program to them and two of the children told stories. Then another student, Adah, sang a beautiful lullaby which produced smiles. We initially thought that what had softened the air was the song's mention of the names of the angels Michael, Gavriel, Uriel, Rafael, who are also revered in Islam. We later realized it might have additionally been that the song's refrain — a plaintive assurance that shekinah (in Hebrew "a dwelling or settling of divine presence") was all around — had an almost identical counterpart in sakinah (a cognatein Arabic that signifies the "presence or peace of God"). And the visitors might have been thinking, here was a Jewish girl singing a lovely song about concepts that were dearly familiar.

Children at the Well, now in its 11th year, is based right here in the Capital Region. Our storytellers have blossomed into confident, empathetic and flourishing young adults. We want to widely share our good fortune and our recipe for peace, understanding and youth leadership. So we've written a book to help others start their own youth storytelling programs. Help us publish it and export this homegrown resource (dare I say local treasure?) by supporting our Kickstarter campaign and sharing it with others.